The Five Devils (2022, Léa Mysius) (Patreon)

68/100

"Did you love me before I existed?" Opinion seems sharply divided regarding whether the hook here—an initial, mildly fanciful idea that unexpectedly goes nowhere in and of itself, instead fueling another, truly bonkers scenario—is inspired or just silly; I kinda loved it, perhaps because I'd given up hope of ever again being caught off guard by what I think of as the "La Jetée"/Twelve Monkeys theory of time travel, in which visiting the past means that you were always present there. Mysius and her co-screenwriter, Paul Guilhaume, deploy their eternalism in a unique fashion (homemade perfume as proxy-Proustian time machine, with a silent, watchful Vicky visible only to her future aunt) and for singularly perverse ends—this is basically a dual tragic love story rooted in kids' inadvertently destructive power, acknowledging that their mere existence in the world (crucially, Vicky never actually does anything during her visitations) can fuck up adults' lives, and leaving startlingly open the question of whether or not parents' deep, abiding love for them is worth it. Or maybe that's just how merrily childless me perceived the movie, though any other interpretation would seem tough to defend. Sally Dramé's a tremendous find, giving Vicky a hard, intelligent gaze that looks vaguely dangerous without crossing the line into malevolent; there's never any sense that this little girl understands that she's engineering her own birth, which would otherwise surely never have happened, but she knows that she's doing something. Falls short of real excellence only in that neither the primary nor secondary aborted romance gets sufficient attention to feel worth mourning. Adèle Exarchopolous and Swala Emati do solid work, but "Total Eclipse of the Heart" is carrying way too much of the weight.